At CES 2024, AI Is Here to Help

If you believe the hype, AI will someday generate Hollywood films, cure cancer, and make driving a historical oddity. But at CES 2024, it’s tackling some more immediate and achievable goals.

LG and Samsung touted AI features that tune your television’s picture quality. Nvidia can use its GPUs to find what you want from hundreds of documents. And dozens of startups pitched AI assistants, avatars, coaches, and tutors.

LG and Samsung become AI hub hopefuls

Henry Kim, team leader for the ThinQ Platform business at LG Electronics U.S., speaks on stage during the 2024 International CES, in Las Vegas, on 8 January 2024.James Atoa/UPI/Alamy

LG and Samsung positioned their new televisions as AI powerhouses. That’s not entirely novel: Both have used AI for years to upscale low-resolution content to 4K resolution. For 2024, though, LG hopes its televisions can become an assistant.

“We want to help people find the settings they need,” says David Park, head of customer enablement at LG. “This isn’t just a television throwing up a bunch of words at random. It’s much more conversational.”

LG demonstrated a chatbot interface users can converse with to find settings, optimize image quality, or troubleshoot problems. It’s not unlike the search functions on many devices today. But the chatbot, unlike search, can help you find a setting with a name you can’t remember or recommend settings based on what you’re trying to achieve.

Samsung went a step further, branding its new televisions as “AI screens.” Many features that fall under this umbrella are meant to improve image quality or motion clarity, but others offer ease-of-use and accessibility. The company demonstrated an on-device, AI-powered optical character recognition (OCR) technology that can serve as a “voice guide” for subtitles. It also showed a mode called Relumino Together, which uses AI to enhance the image for those with low vision.

Both also came to the show with AI robots for the home. Samsung’s is a new iteration of Ballie, first shown at CES 2020, while LG touted its “two-wheeled AI agent.” The dream is to embody the AI services people might access on a TV, computer, or phone. Ballie even has a built-in projector that lets you bring whatever you’re viewing on a television or laptop with you.

Samsung’s Ballie robot just wants to be helpful.Samsung

But these robots also outline the limits of AI at CES 2024. They’re just prototypes for now, and it’s unclear when (or if) they’ll see release.

Startup makes AI your instruction manual

Of course, it’s not just tech giants looking to get in on the AI buzz. Eureka Park, a hub for startups on the CES show floor, was bursting with AI-powered assistants.

Among these was BlinkIn, a German startup building a multimodal “companion experience” called Houston, which is accessed through a smartphone app. Its purpose is similar to the chatbot on LG’s TV, but BlinkIn wants to offer advice for everything in your home, from…